Do you block your quilts when they’re complete? I do, most of the time. Blocking helps the quilt lay flat and hang straight, and can help counteract slight ruffling or waviness in the borders. Here’s what you’ll need:

• Am old, clean sheet or piece of fabric bigger than the quilt (helpful to keep lint or pet hair off the quilt, and a bit of the moisture off the carpet)
• One wet quilt (I wash most of my quilts in the washer, either with a clear water pre-wash and then soap, or just clear water; you can also start with a dry quilt, and sprinkle or spray water on it to thoroughly wet while it’s on the floor)
• A tape measure
• A Stanley S2 Laser Level Square (more on this tool here), or a 15″-24″ square acrylic ruler
• An oscillating fan
• One cat (optional)

Spread out the sheet on the floor, ideally in a room or area that you can close off for 24 hours to keep curious pets or kids away from the quilt while it dries flat. Carefully spread out the quilt on the sheet, patting it into shape, but not stretching it. Smooth out any bubbles or wrinkles, and try to make the borders look square and even.

Once the quilt is looking as flat as possible, measure across the top, middle and bottom of the quilt. If these measurements are not the same on the top middle and bottom, pat, smoosh, and mash the quilt lightly until they are. Yes, these are very technical methods here, smooshing and mashing.

Keep working with it until the the measurements are even, and then measure the left, right and center of the quilt top to bottom and repeat the smooshing and mashing process until these three measurements are equal as well.

Once the measurements in each direction are equal, use the Laser Level Square (or the large square ruler) to square up the quilt. The Laser Level Square shines a red laser line all the way down each side of the quilt from the corner to help you straighten the quilt. Using a large square ruler isn’t as easy, but you can at least square up each corner, and eyeball the sides between them to make them straighter. More smooshing and mashing may be required to make the quilt look like a square or rectangle rather than a parallelogram. Examine each corner and side and smoosh and mash until everything is straight and each corner is a 90 degree angle.

Use the measuring tape to check the measurements one more time, in case anything changed while you were squaring it up. Leave the quilt to dry on the floor for 24 hours, or until completely dry. Picking the quilt up while it’s still damp undoes all your hard work! Use an oscillating fan to help speed the drying process.

I block my quilts before I sew on a hanging sleeve or a label. If a quilt is ever washed after it’s been hanging a while, it should be blocked again while drying. I do block most of my quilts that are meant to hang, even king size show quilts, but I don’t block lap or bed quilts if they won’t ever be hung on a wall.

That’s my blocking method; if you have anything to add or a link to your method, share it!

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Clover White Marking Pen review: Keep It or Bin It? I’ve blathered on about the Clover White Marking Pen before, but it bears repeating, especially after my “A-Ha” moment” the other day. This is why the White Marking Pen (Fine) from Clover rocks:

No, you’re not seeing double, I marked the first set of lines through the stencil on the border of this quilt, and it was in the wrong place, so I marked over it, figuring I’d be able to remember which lines were the right ones later. Yeah, right. And there were other parts of the marking on this quilt that were much worse, with so many lines and marks that it was likely to be impossible to figure out where to machine quilt when the time came.

But wait! I’d temporarily forgotten that you can use the iron to make the marks disappear:

Ah-la-peanutbuttersandwiches and A-Ha! A quick pass with the iron, and the marks were gone, and I could re-mark the lines in the proper place. This makes fitting continuous line borders easier too, since you can start at the corners and mark your way along, guestimating as you go how it will all fit together in the middle, and if you need to, you can erase a bit of it and remark it to make it fit better in the end.

And while the Clover White Marking Pen is ideal for really dark fabrics like this black Bali batik, I’ve used it successfully on even medium value printed fabrics, when nothing else would do. The ink is delivered via a roller ball like a Gelly Roll pen, and marking lightly is best. Also note that the ink is virtually invisible until it starts to dry, and will become fully white and opaque when completely dry. The white ink sits on top of the fabric a bit, so that it’s easier to see under the sewing machine lamp. It’s become my go-to marker when I’m faced with a difficult marking task.

It is a bit expensive, selling for around $6.50 per pen in shops, and to be honest, I sometimes marvel at how fast the ink in the pen disappears, but it’s so worth it when no other marker in the arsenal is up to snuff. You can find it cheaper if you scout the Internet a bit, and buy in multiples so that the shipping costs per pen are cut down.

Definitely a Keep It notion in my book! If you’ve used it, share your experiences, good or bad, here!

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After a pretty productive week last week on The Book, I feel like this week may get away from me entirely until Friday. The minutiae of at least two weeks of life is condensed into this one week, with “something” to do each day. I did manage to finish one of the biggest projects in the book over the weekend, and I’ve made great progress on the next biggest. Once these two are out of the way, I’ll feel a lot better about how quickly the manuscript will get done.

ITMan and I spent the entire day today (and I really do mean the entire day, from 7:45 a.m. until 4:00 p.m.) dealing with car maintenance. Both cars needed their winter tires put on and oil changes, as well as a couple of smaller fix-its and warranty repairs, so we just used his day off to get it done. It might not have taken quite so long had the service department not lost the keys to the Mustang. Yes, they LOST the keys and the transmitter to my car somewhere in the service area. Good thing I had a spare key with me. They didn’t find it until we’d been gone a full hour; they sent me home with a brand new key and transmitter, but now I’ll have to go back at some point and have the original key, and my other spare, reprogrammed since I guess they won’t work now that the whole system has been reprogrammed. Sheesh.

Despite being in the Ford dealer’s waiting area all day, I got a surprising amount of work done on The Book. I took the laptop with me, plugged in to their power and did drafts of the instructions for two of the quilts in the book, so it wasn’t a completely wasted day like it could have been. The trip back over there to take care of the key mess will be wasted time, but at least it’s not a “have to do right now” thing…

Backing up a bit: Sunday was the day to head to the Holiday Bazaar in Heidelberg, and shop for foody gifts to mail back to family in the States, but the entire thing was really just a bust. The vinegars and oils that we usually send back won’t be going this year, as the vendor was all out of the good stuff before we got there. I’ve no idea what that means for the family Christmas boxes, and I don’t even really have time to think about it too seriously at the moment. I’m waiting and hoping for inspiration to hit.

Then on Monday I had to be a nice Mommy and take Guitar Girl back to the bazaar, since she worked all weekend and wouldn’t have been able to go otherwise. It was a bust the first time around, but maybe I spent more time just perusing the aisles on Monday (since I knew there wasn’t any of the “must buy” stuff there anyway), because I did find a couple of other cool things, including these:

Woohoo! Slippers that you put in the microwave and then put on your feet! Awesome! I used them this evening, and they are perfect. Though I LOVE my quilt studio, it has absolutely no insulation up here and it’s freezing even now (and it’s not even deep into winter here), so my feet are always cold (and don’t get me started on how bad this room up here is when it’s windy outside. brrrr.). The radiators are so weak and wimpy up here that they don’t even deserve the name, so there’s no such thing as climate control here unless you count slippers, socks, sweaters and scarves.

The Wonnie slippers have flax seeds and herbs in them so they smell nice when heated, and are wonderfully soft and soothing. You can’t walk in them, so it’s a sit-and-relax type of thing, but I did figure out how to run the sewing machine at the right speeds for machine quilting with them on. So I now have another climate control option for my feet!

Here’s Shadow’s version of climate control:

He’s always been a chilly little thing, and since there’s not an ounce of fat on him he has no insulation. What he’d really like is my lap 24/7, but failing that, he camps out by this space heater that’s sitting by my computer chair all day long, as long as it’s on. He turns over once in a while, to roast the other side evenly. We’re both a little warmer now, at least!

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